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Researchers have argued that, depending on the framing of the Northern Ireland conflict, each group could either be a minority or a majority relative to the other. This complicates macrosocial explanations of the conflict which make specific predictions on the basis of minority or majority positions. The present paper argues that this conundrum may have arisen from the inherent variability in microidentity processes that do not fit easily with macroexplanations. In this paper the rhetoric of relative group position is analysed in political speeches delivered by leading members of an influential Protestant institution in Northern Ireland. It is apparent that minority and majority claims are not fixed but are flexibly used to achieve local rhetorical goals. Furthermore, the speeches differ before and after the Good Friday Agreement, with a reactionary “hegemonic” Unionist position giving way to a “majority-rights power sharing” argument and a “pseudo-minority” status giving way to a “disempowered minority” argument. These results suggest a view of the Northern Ireland conflict as a struggle for “symbolic power,” i.e., the ability to flexibly define the intergroup situation to the ingroup’s advantage.

The growing popularity of English national insignia in international football tournaments has been widely interpreted as evidence of the emergence of a renewed English national consciousness. However, little empirical research has considered how people in England actually understand football support in relation to national identity. Interview data collected around the time of the Euro 2000 and the 2002 World Cup tournaments fail to substantiate the presumption that support for the England football team maps onto claims to patriotic sentiment in any straightforward way. People with far-right political affiliations did generally use national football support to symbolise a general pride in English national identity. However, other people either claimed not to support the England national team precisely because of its associations with nationalism, or else bracketed the domain of football support from more general connotations of English patriotism.

This article compares the ways in which references to ‘the (British) Empire’ were constructed and used in interview accounts of national identity and domestic politics in Scotland and in England. In Scotland, spontaneous accounts of Empire were typically formulated in conjunction with nationalist moral meta-narratives. Respondents variously inferred heroic national character from Scotland's role in Empire, or cast Scottish history as an enduring struggle between progressive forces of nationalism and atavistic forces of Anglo-British colonialism. The construct of Britishness was often seen to derive from, and to be synonymous with, the history of Empire. In England, the Empire story tended to be framed within anti-nationalist meta-narratives. Imperialism was generally understood to represent a product of excessive nationalism, and tales of Empire were used to draw exemplary moral lessons concerning the deficiencies of Anglo-British national character and of the catastrophic consequences of the pursuit of national self-interest more generally. The existence of Britain, and the construct of Britishness, were generally understood to both predate and postdate the history of Empire.

At the time of the devolution settlement in the UK, there was widespread concern that the establishment of the Scottish Parliament and National Assembly for Wales would prompt a rise in English identity at the expense of British identity and, in turn, threaten polyethnic constructions of citizenship. Such presumptions typically rested on reified understandings of the category labels British and English, and conflated the construct of national identity with the constructs of territorial belonging, social inclusion and citizenship. Post-devolution survey data do not currently reveal a decline in British identity in England. Measures of attachment to Englishness vary as a function of ethnic origin of respondent, but also as a function of question wording. A qualitative interview study of young adult Pakistani-origin Muslims in Greater Manchester, north-west England, illustrates how Englishness may be understood to pertain variously to an exclusive cultural or racial category, or to an inclusive territorial entity or community of political interest. Ethnic constructions of English identity need not imply exclusive understandings of citizenship, but their meaning depends crucially on the ways in which nationality and identity are in turn understood in relation to matters of polity and civil society. Conversely, inclusive understandings of national identity do not guarantee the existence of effective ethnic integration or substantive ethnic equality.

Advocates of semi-structured interview techniques have often argued that rapport may be built, and power inequalities between interviewer and respondent counteracted, by strategic self-disclosure on the part of the interviewer. Strategies that use self-disclosure to construct similarity between interviewer and respondent rely on the presumption that the respondent will in fact interpret the interviewer's behaviour in this way. In this article we examine the role of interviewer self-disclosure using data drawn from three projects involving interviews with young people. We consider how an interviewer's attempts to ‘do similarity’ may be interpreted variously as displays of similarity or, ironically, as indicators of difference by the participant, and map the implications that this may have for subsequent interview dialogue. A particular object of concern relates to the ways in which self-disclosing acts may function in the negotiation of category entitlement within interview interactions.